FreeBSD Developer Summit, October, 2011

Meeting Plaza, Maarssen, The Netherlands
October 6 - 8, 2011.

This invitation-only FreeBSD Developer Summit takes place at EuroBSDcon 2011, located in Maarssen, The Netherlands. FreeBSD committers are welcome to register themselves using this wiki; non-committers have to be sponsored by a committer to attend.

EuroBSDcon 2011

EuroBSDcon 2011 takes place between 6 - 9 October 2011. All attendees are encouraged to attend EuroBSDcon, as well as present their work. The conference is located at the Meeting Plaza. Remember that you must separately register for EuroBSDcon (but only if you are not a EuroBSDcon speaker); visit the EuroBSDcon web page for details where you can buy tickets.

REGISTRATION IS OPEN. CLOSING DATE: 28 SEPTEMBERREGISTRATION IS NOW CLOSED. THANK YOU ALL FOR REGISTERING!

The information on this page is subject to change; please check back for updates.

Sponsors

The EuroBSDcon developer summit would not be possible without the generous support of sponsors.

EuroBSDcon provides logistical support, including organizing rooms for the event and for developers to stay in. EuroBSDcon also covers board and travel for all EuroBSDcon speakers. FreeBSD developers can help support the summit by speaking at EuroBSDcon! You can also help support EuroBSDcon and the developer summit by encouraging people to attend the conference, and especially to attend tutorials.

Travel Information

Maarssen is a municipality and a town in the Netherlands. It is situated just outside of the city of Utrecht, almost like a suburb. It has a population of almost 40,000. The river Vecht flows through the town, and the Amsterdam-Rhine canal borders it. It lies in an area called the Vechtstreek. On January 1, 2011 Maarssen merged with Breukelen and Loenen to Stichtse Vecht.

Interesting sights to see: The Netherlands Drugstore Museum. This museum tracks the history of drug stores in the Netherlands. They have a large collection of gapers including one 2 meters high. The also have two historic drugstores, one from 1901 and the other from 1934. The Skating Museum. Learn about the history of ice skates and other winter objects.

You can buy tickets online or at bigger train stations at the yellow ticket machines. Note that most smaller train stations like Maarssen do not have a manned office where tickets can be bought, though. Planning your journey within the Netherlands can be done via this Holland by Train site.

The 38 bus runs between Maarssen trains station and Utrecht central train station, but not through the centre of Maarssen. Buses that run through Maarssen include the 35 and 36.

Maarssen is just off the A2 motorway, the motorway that connects Amsterdam and Utrecht. This road is very busy with a lot of traffic jams during peak hours.

There are 3 international airports within one-hour commute to the venue:

Schiphol Amsterdam Airport (AMS) -- The closest airport to Maarssen. There is a train station at Schiphol Plaza and there are taxies available at Schiphol Plaza (just follow the signs after passing customs). You can use the Holland by Train site for information on how to travel to Maarssen (see above).

Rotterdam Airport (RET) -- From the airport the bus 33 runs to Rotterdam Central station. It departs every 15 minutes and the journey itself takes about 20 minutes. From Rotterdam Central Station you can then schedule your journey by train (see above).

Einhoven Airport (EIN) -- Bus 401 runs every 10 minutes on Thursday and Friday between Eindhoven Airport and Eindhoven Central Station. On Saturday every 15 minutes and on Sunday every half hour. From Eindhoven Central Station see the train information (above).

RFID cards (OV Card) -- The dutch public transportation system in moving to RFID-based card. Such cards can be bought for EUR 7.50 (+ debit) at most train stations. These cards are valid at buses, subway, trams, and trains, but are not always exchangeable between them. Try to avoid them.

Note that there you can also find cheaper paper tickets for public transport, sold in cards with strips. Each cards contains 15 strips. Within Maarssen, 2 strips are needed for a single trip. 15 strips cost EUR 7.50, i.e. it is EUR 0.50 per strip or EUR 1 per person one way.

From Maarssen to Utrecht, trains works best, a one-way ticket is EUR 2.

There a number of cab companies available in the Netherlands, like UTC (Utrecht Taxi) and TCA (Amsterdam Taxi). Official taxi cars can be recognized by the taxi sign on top of the car and blue number plates.

There can bikes rented from the train station.

Approaching Meeting Plaza and Carlton President

Use the local route planner to find your way. The street address is for the Meeting Plaza is Planetenbaan 100, 3606 Maarssen, and it is Floraweg 25, 3542 Utrecht for Carlton President.

Note: To enter these addresses into the route planner, remove the postal code (four-digit number before the city name).

Common Routes

Maarssen Train Station to Carlton President. Take Bus 37 (Bisonspoor, with destination "Utrecht Centraal") and get off at Zonnebaan.

Carlton President to Meeting Plaza. Taken Bus 37 (Zonnebaan, with destination "Maarssenbroek via Lage Weide") and get off at Bloemstede/Boomstede.

Carlton President to Lekker Belangrijk. Take Bus 37 (Zonnebaan and get off at Bisonspoor. Take Bus 36 (with destination Utrecht Centraal) and get off at Raadhuisstraat.

Carlton President to De Heeren van Maarssen. Take Bus 37 (Zonnebaan, with destination "Maarssenbroek via Lage Weide") and get off at Bisonspoor. Take Bus 36 (with destination Utrecht Centraal) and get off at Maarsseveensevaart.

Buses to the Venue

There will be buses between Carlton President and Meeting Plaza. The first bus leaves around 08:00 from the hotel. The second and last bus will be around 08:30. In the afternoon there will be buses too, ask at the venue.

Visas

Some attendees may need to apply for a Visa, please check before traveling. If you need a formal invitation letter (never hurts), let us know.

Accommodation

There is a special offer for attendees at Carlton Presidentup to 50 rooms and until 31 August 15 September. Rooms are available for EUR 95 (+ 5% city tax) per day excluding breakfast but including free wireless access. This hotel is in a walking distance from the venue. Please do not book breakfast in advance as there is breakfast provided by the organizers (see below).

Schedule

The developer summit spans three days, with a mixture of hacking, working group meetings, and presentations. It takes place on the 6th and 7th of October, on the same days as the EuroBSDcon tutorials. Many developers will arrive on the night of the 5th and meet for dinner and drinks before things kick off. Most developers will stay on through EuroBSDcon to give and attend talks. It is an excellent conference -- a good FreeBSD developer showing has countless benefits, not least the opportunity to tell the world what we are doing.

Detailed Schedule

Working group sessions will be held in smaller rooms. Additional short talks will be given during a FreeBSD Developers' Summit track at EuroBSDcon on Saturday, October 8th. The events in this track will be part of EuroBSDcon and require a EuroBSDcon registration. All rooms will have A/V equipment.

Please arrive by 8:30 AM for the morning sessions otherwise you may miss the breakfast. Attendees will be able to pick up badges and T-shirts from 9:00 AM to 10:00 AM each morning.

Note: In order to attend a working group meeting on Day 1 you MUST contact the working group organizer and be approved to attend. The goal is to keep each working group small and focused.

Working Groups

These sessions are intended to get developers with common areas of interest or specific projects in mind together for collaboration and hacking. They might involve prepared presentations, structured code reading, or a notebook-assisted whiteboard session. Advance preparation for such events is critical so everyone comes to the table with the right reading done so you can get to the meat of the matter.

Improve the FreeBSD documentation set, both in terms of content as well as tool support and collaboration between doc committers

With the upcoming FreeBSD 9.0-RELEASE, we need to get the documentation into the right shape so that it accurately reflects and documents the features of this release. Also, we want to continue some of the stuff we discussed at the BSDCan DevSummit and talk about what progress has been made since then.

Take stock of progress made by 9.0; discuss and revise APIs as needed (especially access to ioctls in sandboxes); lay out a whole-OS plan for adoption of Capsicum throughout risky daemons, command line tools, libraries, etc.

Discuss how the current FreeBSD toolchain integrates with 9.x and future 10.x releases

--

Talk Descriptions

Tell us about your latest project, brainstorm on solutions to a hard problem, train us to use a new tool, make observations about a FreeBSD development process and how to improve it, tell us how your company uses FreeBSD, or coordinate activities. But, please do not duplicate a talk that you are giving at EuroBSDcon.

If you would like to give a short talk in the Developer Summit track at EuroBSDcon, please e-mail us so we can add it to the talk table here. Talk slots are about 20 minutes long, including discussions. The deadline for talk submissions is 11 September.NO MORE SUBMISSIONS, PLEASE!

Note to Presentors

If you are in trouble with preparing your slides, you could use the template attached to the page. It contains a LaTeX source file that you can modify to create PDF slides for the FreeBSD Developer Summit. It uses the Beamer class which is an easy-to-use extension to LaTeX for making presentations. You can easily install it by the following command (as root):

# pkg_add -r latex-beamer

This will install Beamer and pdfLaTeX that can be used for compiling the sources to produce the desired PDF file.

$ pdflatex my-presentation.latex

A few rule-of-thumbs when creating slides:

Try to make things legible, use large fonts.

Have title and closing.

Use less text, you do not have to include everything on the slides. (Prepare and) Do a demonstration if needed.

You have only a limited amount of time, having only 1 slide per minute (in addition to title and closing) is usually fine.

Sometimes images can tell more than pure text.

Discussions and meetings are the place where you might want to talk about the details.

Registration

In order to attend, you must register in advance; this allows us to size rooms, order food, provide beverages, and make dinner reservations. We appreciate your cooperation in letting us know your plans well in advance of the event. Non-committers must be sponsored by a committer in order to attend. Due to increased attandence in recent years, companies are limited to one non-committer unless permission is explicitly granted by the organizers.

REGISTRATION IS OPEN. CLOSING DATE: 28 SEPTEMBERREGISTRATION IS NOW CLOSED.

A registration fee is charged for all attendees in order to cover the costs of the summit (rooms, internet access, lunch, use of A/V equipment). This fee is EUR 59 per day. If you book a tutorial on Thursday or Friday, you will have access to the summit at no further costs during that day as thevenue costs will be covered from the tutorial fee.

The fee can be paid through the conference site where the summit is listed as tutorial. (If you do not find it in the list contact us.) Do not set your registration status yourself, we will do that once your registration has been confirmed.

Further Useful Information

Catering

There are sandwiches for breakfast arranged for the attendees for all summit (and conference) days at the venue. Note that breakfast is from 08:30 to 09:30 every day at the venue. Lunch, tea, and coffee are included in the summit fee, they will be also served in the Meeting Plaza during the days. Please specify your special (dietary, vegetarian, etc.) needs on meal at the EuroBSDcon registration site when buying tickets.

Dinners are paid on individual basis, but all the places are booked in advance: